


Maia

by TwistedWillows



Category: Fate/Zero
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 04:49:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8831026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwistedWillows/pseuds/TwistedWillows
Summary: There are lots of things Kiritsugu never asked her.Русский: http://archiveofourown.org/works/9852935





	

**Author's Note:**

> I noticed only after writing this that the fandom spells Maia's name as 'Maiya' but to be frank, I prefer it without the 'Y'.  
> Posted because the only thing currently on this account is some ancient relic about satirical flamboyant countries and that will not be my only legacy on the internet.

He’s not perfect, and she knows that.  
The saviour never spent quite so much time in the black market. The paragon of morals and humanity he is not. She’s seen him in his prime. His hands are stained red. He speaks in lies disguised as loopholes. She’s watched him play the game, seen his dirty card tricks. She memorized every scam to the letter. She’s watched him fail. Slipping and stumbling and cursing, firing empty rounds into the wall and screaming at bloodied ears long past hearing his lament. So he’s not perfect. But he wants to wash the world clean, and blood is thicker than water.  
She doesn’t follow him because he’s perfect.  
She doesn’t pretend to feel a false sense of duty. Duty is written into the fabric of her soul, built with the calcium which makes up her bones, _to serve Kiritsugu_ coded in the letters of her DNA. There is no reality but the reality that he is. Nothing is physical, nothing exists, until he shows her that it is true. The corporeal world is just an illusion until he reaches out and touches it and shows her that it is real.  
She doesn’t love him because he’s perfect.  
She used to pretend she didn’t love him at all. Her mind was a database and her arms were the mechanisms, an automatic operating system which existed just as easily as it could not exist, in the same way that she existed but was nothing, was flesh but not body. The only thought of which she was capable was Kiritsugu as the centre of the machine, that he was reality and love was a metaphor for something which didn’t exist. That she didn’t have to be someone because she was an extension of him, who named her and touched her and by such means affirmed that her flesh did in fact exist. But that got old- like she got old, the years went by and added quickness to her steps, rapidity to her blade, and a more defined shape to her chest, to her hips. Maia didn’t have a thought for her femininity. Others had. She had changed her body for him. The skeletal thing he found her as was coated with a layer of lean muscle. She made her legs stronger to run and keep up with his pace, her arms stronger to hold his gun. Tens of handprints were burned into her flesh for all the thoughts Kiritsugu didn’t have. Or for the space between her thighs, the shadow of five long, thin shapes.  
To love him was to never have him, to exist watching him and wanting him- if wanting a part of yourself even is possible- but an elusive part of yourself, like a memory locked inside the subconscious of which you have the most burning need. Love was not possible between them- wasn’t even something Maia could comprehend, much less truly desire, and she meant as little to Kiritsugu as a priceless gun which misfired in the most devastating way. And he had a wife- but she caught his eyes lingering one night on the space between her sternum and her abdomen and she realized that maybe the wife didn’t matter- but no, she didn’t matter to Kiritsugu, not at all, and he was as cold and aloof as he had ever been and Maia came into their bedroom and stood in the doorway and occasionally looked down at her wrist watch and waited for him as he kissed his wife goodbye, a gentle press to her hand, to her forehead, to _their daughter’s_ fingers, and then he stood up and grabbed his gun and he left her.  
Maia shouldered her gun and followed along behind. 

She wanted to hate the wife. Irisviel. German. Shorter than her. She had hair like charmeuse silk and Maia hated her voice. She heard it constantly in the castle. She lived so stupidly jubilant. As if she had the right, this human who had never known any hardship- or anything at _all_ besides Kiritsugu and Kiritsugu’s love. Maia wanted to hate her. Wanted so thoroughly that for a year she was never anywhere near _her_ home, never anywhere near Germany, not even Europe. She ducked on a boat bound for South America and lived in a fishing village on the coast for a year and turned her head and closed the door when winter came and the shops put out _Weinachskuchen_. Kiritsugu didn’t care. He called her when she had a job to do. The fastest way back to Germany was a jet from Buenos Aires to Hamburg for 2 million pesos. She could hide her car in the train station, Jürgen could find her a taxi, there was space for the gun in the passenger side under the carpet…  
She hated his wife. A white-skinned princess who held Kiritsugu in the palm of her hand, cradled his child between her arms, the future of his family. Maia thought about it as she waited, naked on the bed of their hotel room, for Kiritsugu to return with condoms. She pictured a blank space, vast nothingness in the place where Irisviel stood. She pictured an empty castle, a single set of boot heels clicking on tile and a single tenor voice calling her. The blankness was right, so she kept picturing it, kept thinking until the wife and her feather-light laugh and her angular German nose wasn’t even there.  
_“Go to him, Maia. He needs you. Keep him safe._ ”  
The wife had long hair as white as the snow and eyes like two polished garnets and when Maia fell from a roof out scouting for Kiritsugu, she went to Irisviel and watched their daughter’s little silver head popping in and out of snow bluffs as Irie dressed and wrapped her wound.  
She’s going to die one day, likely soon. All she knows is guns, and guns are not mages or spirits or spell books. The only magic of a bullet is when it pierces a human heart and makes it cold and still in a chest. She will not survive in his world, not for long. As she passes the children trying to warm themselves in the bus fumes at the station Irisviel’s never seen, she allows herself a single moment of acceptance. Soon, she will die. And as she’s dying, perhaps she will allow herself one single moment, one single folly of someone with a broken heart, and she will wonder to herself if Kiritsugu will ever think of her and miss her. And perhaps she will allow herself, in that final moment, to think that the answer is yes.


End file.
